"THEY" SAY I AM UNHAPPY

It has come to the attention of your Commander that a scientific study conducted by the Center for Disease Control reports that as a resident of Indiana I am ranked as living in the 48th unhappiest State. I want to go on the record that I am very unhappy to learn that our government has spent an unreported and no doubt substantial sum of money to conduct such an idiotic scientific study to determine where happy people reside.

Some clowns conned our government into subsidizing a four year research project that any fool would essentially come to the same assumptions without spending one thin dime. I am confused, however, by the report’s conclusion that the happiest people in the United States live in Louisiana when you consider the fact that the study spanned the two years before and after Hurricane Katrina struck the state. That No #1 ranking totally destroys any creditability or logic to the research, because over one million residents were certainly not happy by any criteria as reported for days by our major media outlets. The survey must have been isolated to Bourbon Street inhabitants.

It does not take a brain surgeon to know that Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee or Arizona would be in the happiest top five, and it does not take a PhD in Economics to know or at least suspect that Illinois, California, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, Connecticut and New York would fall to the bottom five unhappiest states for various financial reasons.

As a resident of the 48th “Unhappiness State,” I feel I am entitled to be depressed, but for different reasons than this so-called research. Yes, the weather stinks in Indiana during the winter, currently unemployment is one of the highest in the country, and let’s not forget the Notre Dame football woes for the last decade or more; but my depression is in reality caused by an inept government from the local to federal level that refuses to adapt suggested reforms.

I have shared my theories that could have saved our federal treasury one hell of a lot of time and money. How did I get so smart?

COMMANDER GRANGER